First Look: Diamine Shimmertastic Purple Pizzazz

I put Purple Pizzazz in a Lamy Vista with 1.1 mm stub nib.

Purple Pizzazz writes smoothly and starts up cleanly. It seems like a wet ink. It takes longer than Blue Lightning to dry on fountain-pen friendly paper. It shades. The gold shimmers.

Purple Pizzazz looks particularly nice on Tomoe River Paper.

But it also shimmers on Clairefontaine.

And looks attractive even on Rhodia dot paper.

I did notice that after the initial writing session, I didn’t get as much gold in the written lines unless I gently shook the pen first.

I wondered if the Lamy Vista’s feed design might have contributed to this, because the gold seemed to very quickly migrate to the outside of the Vista’s section when I stopped writing.

So just to make sure, I put Purple Pizzazz in an Edison Herald with medium nib. Looking at the Herald’s converter, I could see that the gold particles were distributed throughout the solution.

But when the pen was at rest, I also could see some gold particles start falling to the bottom part of the converter. I have now seen this with all the Shimmertastic inks I’ve tried in demonstrators or converter pens where I could see the ink.

Note that some particles do remain in suspension even when the pen is at rest, just not all of them. So to get the maximum shimmer, whenever I pick up one of these pens for the first time, I now am in the habit of rocking or gently shaking the pen to distribute the gold for maximum effect.